43
Putting it into words
During a business meeting recently, I jotted down several terms that perked my ears.
They were the kind of terms we hear often, but in the context of the business under discussion, the words were jargon. They were meant to convey points judged to be understood by the others in the meeting.
It struck me that fishing is like business when it comes to the words we use to talk about them. Fishing has its fair share of jargon.
In the recent meeting, person talked about “ducks in a row” and another noted matters “on my radar.” They were neither hunting nor scouring the sky for flying objects. But we all knew what the terms meant in the context of our meeting.
Other business jargon is much more obtuse. What in the world does it mean to “leverage a best practice” or to engage in “blue sky thinking” or find the company’s “core competency”? A glossary would be helpful.
Fishing needs a glossary, too.
It stands to reason. Jargon is not meant to fall on all ears equally. A definition of jargon says it all: “special words or expressions by a particular profession or group that are difficult for others to understand.”
Many of the words fishermen speak are peculiar to fishing. What, for example, would the average citizen envision when I utter “lunker”? Or how about “backlash” and “crankbait”? Do you have a clue when I say “breakline” or “power fishing”?
If you know the meaning of “I was following power fishing along the breakline and caught a lunker on my crankbait after picking out a backlash,” then you have your doctorate degree in fishing.
If, on the other hand, all of that sounds like gobbledygook, let me translate. “I was fishing where the depth changed and caught a huge fish on my diving lure after untangling the line on my reel.”
Some fishing jargon is newsworthy.
A Lake Erie walleye angler recently caught a true lunker. He landed a 27-pound lake trout that, when officially certified, will likely be a new Ohio state record.
Some fishing jargon is downright descriptive.
If you guessed “power fishing” is fishing with aggressive, fast-paced tactics (as opposed to watching a bobber for hours on end), you are correct. A “creature bait” is the perfect name for a genre of lures that sprout appendages only vaguely similar to real critters’ fins, legs and claws.
Some fishing jargon transcends fishing.
Gymnasts were flipping long before bass anglers took to “flipping” by gently presenting lures on a short length of line from an extra-long rod. It’s also a fair guess that people were dealing with backlash in their societies many millennia before the first fishing reel overran into a “backlash” of tangled, knotted line.
Some fishing jargon incorporates geography. A “Bimini twist” leaves little doubt about where it was first coined. You’d only need one guess to correctly answer the state in which the “Alabama rig” first became popular.
So it goes. Thank goodness for jargon so we anglers can keep our business secrets.
And now I think I’m going to leverage the best practices of anglers everywhere and capitalize on my core competency to move the needle and bring some blue sky thinking to my next fishing trip.